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Review: The Time Machine
Everybody has his own favorite, but The Time Machine has to rank way up there as one of the best, darkest and most prescient futuristic yarns ever spun. But while Jackson was able to infuse his movie with the spirit of Tolkien's story, indiscriminate special effects and limpid, forgettable acting leach H.G. Wells and his eerily dark vision of the future out of this one. Reading A Time Machine, you always felt humanity would pay dearly for its arrogance one day. Seeing this movie, you just end up looking at your watch.
For some reason, the locale of this film has moved from London to New York. Why? You get the feeling the producers were trying to make this movie a bit of a cautionary nuclear tale. Then the movie was delayed by 9/11, because it originally contained (and still does) some destruction-of-Manhattan sequences, most removed. Film essayists will have a field day in a few years de-constructing post and pre-9/11 Hollywood.
Guy Pearce plays the brooding, tragic scientist Alexander Hartdegen, Jeremy Irons the Uber-Morlock. Irons is great. Pearce is strangely miscast here, alternately twitchy, sweaty, distracted and simply inarticulate. If you haven't read the book, you have no idea what his motivations are, who he's is involved with, or why he's making so many staggering decisions about the human race all by himself, in a mili-second. But it's Hollywood silly, so it's all about the girl, in this time or another. This profoundly trivializes the story. The ending of The Time Machine is one of the great closings in all sci-fi, but here it has all the punch of some wet paper towels.
Increasingly, from the Star Wars series to this movie, special effects are becoming a problem for sci-fi movies. All of the bad guys look alike (the Morlocks could slip easily into Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, or Return of the Mummy). Hollywood's ideas about villains are less effective than Wells prose. Enough, already, with these special-effect monsters who are all alike: loud, bug-eyed, simian, fast-moving, cannibalistic, slimy.
In the novel, Hartdegen was brave, angry, philosophical and passionate. Here, Pearce mostly seems to have been clubbed in the head early on and remains largely insensate. Aside from taking on the class issues -- one species above ground, the other below -- Wells was joining Shelley and Verne in squaring off on tech arrogance, something very much alive, especially in America, at the opening of the 21st century. That theme is almost completely obscured here, apart from a lame cautionary alarm that one of Hartdegen's friends sounds about scientists' uncertainty about where they are going. Against a backdrop of growing hysteria about suitcase-sized dirty bombs being detonated in our major cities by enraged working class kids from foreign cultures, the themes of The Time Machine are more, not less, powerful.
The actual time travel is pretty neat -- fast and beautiful -- but that accounts for only about 15 minutes of this movie. When we're not zipping ahead in time, the movie becomes simplistic and soulless. Mostly, it's just flat. Sadly, you can give it a pass, and that's a pity, an opportunity squandered. We're not going to get another remake of this book anytime soon.
"Suckage" may be grammatically incorrect, but in the study of linguistics, it is rather intereting. There is a new use of an old word with an irregular ending in noun form. When the word finds a new use, people, at some level (either conscious (sp) or not) try to regularize to word to common English usage.
Take fly for example. What is the past tense?
Flew, right? As in "the bird flew;" however, if you are playing baseball, it is appropriate to say "the batter flied out."
While it may not be grammatically "correct," suckage seems to be an understood phrase, used by several people, and is thus linguistically correct.
Of course, I assume that the "Language Nazism" in general was meant as a joke, so I'll shut up now.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Please stop saying that! Hollywood movies have always been sickeningly patriotic and generally bullshit, even before 9/11.
AND IT'S 11/9!!
[rant]
I know that's just because I'm from the UK, but it makes more sense. Day/Month/Year, they go up in increasing order of size. THE US SYSTEM MAKES NO SENSE!
[/rant]
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
9/11 was an event as profound as Pearl Harbour. It is inevitable that mention must be made of this event.
You're both wrong. Use ISO-8601, YYYY-MM-DD. It's unambiguous, sortable, and already common in much of the world. This format is also widely used by programmers maintaining time-specific data, e.g., radar plots or weather models - it makes a very handy filename.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Windows (and at least one application) inexplicably fails to support this format, even though it's an ISO standard. Or should that be "because" it's an ISO standard?...
As for "9/11" itself, that particular date will always be said that way since 911 is the emergency number in the US, similar to 991 in the UK.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"